Buyer’s Pick: The cream of the crop from the world’s non-fiction buyers

With so much non-fiction product out there, the challenge for buyers is to corral programming which sets their service apart, but doesn't break the bank. In this series, we ask buyers to pick a recent favorite and how it fits into...

With so much non-fiction product out there, the challenge for buyers is to corral programming which sets their service apart, but doesn’t break the bank. In this series, we ask buyers to pick a recent favorite and how it fits into their purchasing strategy.

Pick: The Adam & Joe Show, produced by Hollywood-based World of Wonder

The premise: Two guys write, host, shoot and edit an entire show from a small apartment in South Brixton, England. ‘It sounds really quite bad,’ says Grimsdale. ‘But it’s not.’

Channel 4 used to run Take Over TV, an America’s Funniest Home Videos-type series. Some of the strangest, and most popular, footage came in from Adam Buxton and Joe Cornish, boyhood friends who’d been making and faking video productions for years. When Take Over ran out of steam, the duo got a shot at their own show. The success of the first four episodes, aired late Saturday nights in December, 1996, spurred Grimsdale to commission six more for later this year.

The show is made on a shoestring, and that’s part of the charm. It works for Grimsdale as he tends to fully finance projects he commissions under his features remit.

It’s a strange fit with the rest of Grimsdale’s mandate, religion, but it meets the channel’s directive to appeal to tastes and interests not catered to by itv. Six or eight half-hours with an entertaining bent have worked best for Grimsdale, especially since the main strand runs on Saturday nights.

On the religion side, Channel 4′s main strand is Witness (12 one-hour films a year). Grimsdale’s definition of ‘religion’ includes films on polygamy, prostitution and the fate of babies born in prison: ‘We don’t go out of our way to label programming.’

About The Author

Daniele Alcinii is a news editor at realscreen, the leading international publisher of non-fiction film and television industry news and content. He joined the RS team in 2015 with experience in journalism following a stint out west with Sun Media in Edmonton's Capital Region, and with communications work in Melbourne, Australia and Toronto. You can follow him on Twitter at @danielealcinii.